A BIG Thank You to all my readers out there for your continuous support and comments! The blog has grown enormously the last year and its all because of you guys! Stay tuned for more articles, discussions and random rants!
Posting has been a bit erratic this year due to first year PhD duties, but next year should be a bit more organised - the first year of any degree is usually a bit chaotic seeing that most of the foundation work is done, but later it is only a matter of getting all the data in! As I mentioned the last time; my studies and gardening are more aligned than before and I find that they have mutual topics in common helping with building good all-round knowledge on each front! Makes post topics and writing a bit easier too! Hee hee...
Hmm...I feel a rant coming on now...
My blog has a chronic disease know as RSS Feed Failure Syndrome or more commonly know as RSSFFS and symptoms include sporadic collapse of the RSS feed and third-party feed host login declines! (LOL!) *Sigh* Each blog has a RSS Feed that is run automatically by Google's FeedBurner service, which had collapsed in 2012 for my blog. This means that any social media updates, such as twitter and feed readers, do not get updated anymore. I had to re-route the feed through a third party site FeedCat.net, which in the most part does a fantastic job. I subscribed to my own feed via email (no, it's not a sad case of me trying to up my subscribers numbers...) to check that my feed is working as it should and if I don't receive an email of my new post, I know something has gone bung again! So, every once in a while the feed fails and this can be many different reasons, some still unbeknown to me. The following possible causes my be the root of the syndrome, for example;
1) Incorrect URLs; of feeds or posts themselves. Not too much of a problem to fix.
2) MS Word formatting junk in the HTML coding. I write my posts in word to save as a backup on my computer. Then I copy-and-paste it into a text document, then copy-and-paste it from the text document to blogger. This gets rid of most of the unnecessary coding from Word, but things like tables need to be pasted directly from Word, leaving <o:p></o:p> stuff in the HTML file, which I have to manually delete. Once I had to go through each and every single post I have every wrote and delete these #%&^! things - took me forever. Now I make sure to zap them before the post goes out - which can be a major pain especially with large tables that generate up to 100 of these stupid things....
3) No apparent reason whatsoever - and FeedCat blocks my login when I try to manually fix it from there! So fine! Considering my password is 'incorrect' - even though it isn't - let's do the Forgot Password function! *Loading, loading.... Email account doesn't exist! ...* DARGH!
So apologies to any delayed or non-existent updates, weird feed reader layouts and general non-functional inconveniences... I'll fix it as soon as the gremlins are out of my computer and internet connection!
Anyways, spring is a little over a month away (although with this heat you would think we are there already!) and preparations are already underway in the garden. If you would like to know the official astronomical dates of spring & summer then check out my Season Lore for the Southern Hemisphere Post. I do hope our rainfall won't be as late as last year and that the rain would be a bit more evenly distributed for proper cropping during February and March, but with "Godzilla El Niño" about we might be having even worse weather! For records on rainfall and seasonal temperatures, check out my latest Weather Report.
I have posted on a majority of the 'standard' vegetables and fruits, therefore I will be posting more often about uncommon/exotic food plants in the future - so watch this space for some interesting experiments for you to try too! I also thought about doing some 'revisits' to the standard fruits and vegies as I have refined my growing techniques and discovered a few new things about the food plants already covered - I am still deciding on how exactly to go about it. Either way, stay tuned for another year of posts and general garden mayhem, right here on Roots 'n' Shoots!
- Me Out -
Related Posts:
B-Post 1#
B-post 2#
B-post 3#
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